Open Social Collaboration: The Missing Piece of Your SEO and Content Marketing Strategy

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

At Tracky, we are all about open social collaboration, all the time. We constantly strive to find ways to work better, not more, and to empower our customers to do the same. And, just like you and any online-focused business, we plan search engine optimization (SEO) and content engagement (CE) strategies.

Through working for a startup, I know these strategies can take a significant amount of time and effort to plan and execute. So, I set out to find a better way to manage our SEO and CE planning process and provide better content (i.e. becoming authoritative by sharing what we're getting done) while optimizing the potential search and social reach for our content..

I’m going to share a few of my secrets on how integrating open social collaboration helps you produce better work and, in true SEOmoz fashion, improve your organic search results.

Open collaboration

It’s important that we first make a distinction between the two ways to use open social collaboration; that’s the “open” component. Let’s look at open social collaboration in two parts: the front end and the back end.

Back end: includes everything that happens before you hit “publish.”

Front end: includes everything that happens after you hit “publish.”

Open only comes into play when it’s time and/or necessary. There’s an entire “private” social collaboration component that’s meant for you or you and your team. You can use open social collaboration to plan your SEO and CE efforts, and then extend your reach privately. Before doing so, it's important to find a collaboration platform that can handle both private and public sharing to truly optimize your SEO and CE strategies.

But back to our content engagement workflow. The back end process includes things like:

Editorial planning for your website, blog, and social networks

Keyword list creation

Content creation for your website, blog, and social networks

Editing and review of content

Delegation of tasks to socially promote each piece of content

Let’s break these steps down even further. As you plan the promotion for the content you create, think strategically about the social networks you use and how they complement your SEO efforts. At Tracky, we plan our content engagement strategy and tactics out weekly (see below).

Each team member knows exactly what they’re responsible for and can easily get a snapshot view of the week’s content plan. We integrate tools from SEOmoz, like the Keyword Difficulty & SERP Analysis, to make sure we’re focused on the most important keywords in our efforts. We tend to break down our promotional tasks by network and typically have at least five tactics per piece of content created.

DID YOU KNOW? On average, it takes five (5) separate tactics to drive people to your website or blog. (tweet this)

The retweet opportunity and the Rule of 60

You may know that getting retweets is the best way to amplify your Twitter reach. But, did you know that many miss out on the complete retweet opportunity? Here’s our tried and true magic mix:

When you search for something on Google, the result titles only display about 70-80 characters (or less). That means the first 60 to 70 characters in your tweet, title tag, and other indexed social postings are the most important. If you include your keywords after that point, it doesn’t do much to help your SEO. I like to call this the Rule of 60.

The Rule of 60 is also important for your title tag. As Ruth Burr wrote in a recent case study, “When your title tag is too long, instead of simply truncating it and adding an ellipsis to the end the way they used to, Google is trying to algorithmically determine a better title for the post.”

A few great tactics for planning out Twitter content (and a variation of this for other social networks) includes:

Creating great content you think will resonate with your customers

Creating SEO-friendly headlines with 70 characters or less title tags

Keywords included in first 60 words of your tweets

Include the link to the post after the keywords (they have the highest likelihood of being retweeted)

Post tweets during times your community are most likely to engage (we personally use Tweriod)

Although this may seem like a lengthy process, over time it becomes second nature – a habit is formed. I keep the checklist around for sustainability (i.e. if someone new had to jump in and do it) reasons. The final tweet recommendation goes to the entire team to share, if they feel so inclined. Publishing versions of posts to Twitter and Facebook (or with Buffer) is a great next step, which adds more SEO value since it’s spiderable and makes social sharing even easier (this is part of the “front end” strategy). When your team is in the loop and your content is shared across multiple platforms, everyone wins!

That’s my perfect example of how open social collaboration and SEO come together to boost your online efforts. How do you use open social collaboration with your team? I'd love to hear you suggestions in the comments below.

For more information on the awesomeness that is open social collaboration, feel free to contact me at @PRsarahevans or sarah@tracky.com. Thanks to the SEOmoz team for the opportunity!

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